Sunday, December 27, 2015

Trumping Our Constitution

Trump and the Post-Constitutional Presidency

Some conservatives say that Donald Trump is a menace to the
Constitution, because he seems intent on picking up Barack Obama’s
D.C.-approved extra-constitutional powers and using them for his own
Trump-ian purposes, maybe even going further down the path to
executive-order dictatorship than Obama did.This aspect of the Trump campaign should be welcomed by constitutional conservatives.Trump is the lens through which liberals can see the magnitude of
what Obama has done, and understand why it’s wrong.

They won’t
rediscover the virtues of divided government until they’re scared to
death of the alternative.The concern among conservatives is shown by Rich Lowry at National Review, whomarvels at how the Tea Party “rebaptized
the GOP in the faith of limited government and constitutional
constraints,” in 2010, producing “a class of constitutional obsessives
like

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)

93%

and

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)

100%

who were focused not just on what government shouldn’t do, but on what it couldn’t
do and why”…

but just five years later, much of the Republican base is
swooning for Donald Trump, who is nobody’s idea of a constitutional
obsessive.

Meanwhile, Rand Paul is on the verge of getting booted to the undercard debate, which he himself described as the “kids’ table.” To avoid that fate, he might skip the next debate altogether.Lowry finds Trump’s expressed
admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin unsurprising, given his
embrace of post-Constitutional strongman government:

Trump exists in a plane
where there isn’t a Congress or a Constitution. There are no trade-offs
or limits.

There is only his will and his team of experts who will
figure out how to do whatever he wants to do, no matter how seemingly
impossible.

The thought you can’t do that
never occurs to him.

He would deport the American-born children of
illegal immigrants.

He has mused about shutting down mosques and
creating a database of Muslims.

He praised FDR’s internment of
Japanese-Americans in World War II.

You can be forgiven for thinking that
in Trump’s world, constitutional niceties—indeed any constraints
whatsoever—are for losers.

It’s only strength that matters.

It shouldn’t
be a surprise that he expresses admiration for Russian President
Vladimir Putin, a “powerful leader” who is “highly respected within his
own country and beyond.”

Trump’s calls to steal Iraq’s oil and kill the
families of terrorists are in a Putinesque key.

For some on the right, clearly, the
Constitution was an instrument rather than a principle.

It was a means
to stop Obama, and has been found lacking.

I happen to be one of those
Constitutional obsessives Lowry mentioned.

My appreciation for the
beauty and wisdom of the American Constitution has only grown as I’ve
seen it shredded, trampled, bypassed, and defaced with progressive
graffiti.

Some claim the Constitution is inapplicable to modern life
because the Founders couldn’t have foreseen our world of technological
marvels; on the contrary, I am increasingly impressed by their foresight
– or more properly, their ability to express timeless principles,
rooted in eternal truths and an understanding of human nature that no
current scientific advance has invalidated at all.Our great-grandparents were fools to
yield the smallest fraction of their constitutional birthright to the
first progressives and socialists, and our great-grandchildren will
still be paying for their mistake, no matter how wisely we vote for the
rest of our lives.On the question of how the
Constitution should restrain government – how we should be trimming the
State to fit the Constitution, not vice versa – I’m somewhere between
Senators Rand Paul and

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 97%, and find their arguments fascinating.

There is true statesmanship to
be seen in the clash between those two on various issues.

Whatever his
poll numbers might be, I would rather not see Paul sent to the kiddie
table, or avoid the debate entirely, because I want to hear more of that
argument.

But that’s just me… me and a few others. That’s not where the country is right now.

I think we can help the country get
there, but it will take time.

The degenerate mess Barack Obama leaves
us didn’t take shape entirely on his watch.

We didn’t get to this
fearsome low-growth, totalitarian moment – a moment in which both the
First and Second Amendments are under sustained attack – in a single
election, and we won’t get out of our predicament in one presidential
term.We have to start turning the runaway
train of collectivist power around, and if Donald Trump scares liberals
into realizing that post-Constitutional unitary executive power is a
horrible idea, I call that a public service.

I’ve congratulated him
before for helping to pull Democrats back from dictatorship a full year
ahead of schedule.

I didn’t think I’d hear the first left-wing paens to
divided, limited government until the day after Obama’s Republican
successor was inaugurated.Lowry alludes to the importance of
this civics lesson when he notes that “Trump is a reaction to Obama’s
weakness, but also to his exaggerated view of executive power,” and
worries that Trump might actually be able to impose unconstitutional
initiatives through raw executive power, because Obama has paved the
way: “A hallmark of Obama’s governance has been to say that he lacks the
power to act unilaterally on a given issue, and then do it anyway.”Conservatives warned liberals about
this consistently throughout Obama’s adventures in executive overreach,
asking with each new power grab, each hasty rewrite of the disastrous
Affordable Care Act: “What are you going to do when a Republican uses
these new executive super-powers to impose ideas you hate?” That question never bothered the Left much, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s because they think the dictum Absolute power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely is
a recipe for their success, not a warning.

They think the model of
government they’ve been building for generations is like the One Ring
forged by Sauron in the Lord of the Rings saga:

it will corrupt anyone who sits in the Oval Office into an instrument
of progressivism and centralized power, no matter how nominally
conservative he might have been during his presidential campaign.

They
think they’ve build a system that cannot be reformed, a living organism
of federal power that will fight savagely to defend itself.

A nominally
small-government Republican might ride that beast for a little while,
but he will never master it.“The way you solve things is by
making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right
thing,” Milton Friedman wisely said.

Liberals saw the dark side of that
wisdom and made it their creed, creating a system that makes it
politically profitable for the right people to do the wrong thing.

The
media calls it “growing in office,” and liberals celebrate Republicans
who “grow in office” until they’re left of the Democrat they defeated.Consider this: if you seriously believe in using centralized power to impose a positive agenda upon an unruly nation, you must eventually lose patience with divided, representative government.

We’ve heard that exasperation with representation constantly in
left-wing rhetoric throughout the Obama presidency – they’re always
fuming at how Congress moves too slowly, and how stubborn
representatives can derail brilliant agendas.

They’re head-over-heels
for the totalitarian ideology of climate change, which is no longer shy
about stating that democracy and representative government cannot be
allowed to stand against its agenda. When the Left succeeded in amending
the Constitution to get Senators elected by popular vote, instead of
serving as representatives of their state governments, they began the
process of dismantling divided government.

They are very close to
finishing the job by rendering Congress largely irrelevant.

Obama’s final steps toward
post-constitutional dictatorship were also meant to create the sort of
national electorate that will never elect a sincere small-government
reformer again.

The Left has been using their power to reshape the
electorate to their liking, with instruments ranging from immigration
policy to expanded dependency on government programs.

Obama’s weak
economy serves the Left’s interests further, by leaving the hated middle
class with less money to spend on activities liberals dislike, and less
confidence to assert their economic independence. Barack Obama is the most focused and
dedicated foe the American middle class has ever faced, and he’s just
about defeated them, by convincing them to fear their neighbors and seek
the protection of the State in all things.

When people with good jobs
need a welfare program to afford the health insurance they think is
essential to survival, the Left doesn’t have much reason to worry about
an independent middle class staging a revolt against their agenda.For all of these reasons, Obama Democrats were willing to bet there would never be
a Republican President using the powers Obama seized – not one
completely hostile to the Left’s interests, at any rate.

No Republican
would ever use the sleazy tricks Democrats used to shove the Affordable
Care Act down our throats.

No Republican could ever get away with
discarding laws he didn’t like, rewriting legislation on the fly in the
Oval Office, treating Congress like a minor obstacle to his ambitions,
or using executive orders to circumvent the law. Many Democrats believe demographic
trends will soon give them a permanent lock on the presidency, the
culmination of a plan to reshape the electorate that weak and foolish
Republicans did little to thwart when they had a chance.

Even if there
are one or two more Republican Presidents before the demographic lock
snaps shut forever, the Democrats are confident it will be someone they
can handle, with the media’s help.

They’re willing to roll their eyes,
stop complaining about “gridlock” and “obstructionism” for a while, and
become the biggest gridlocking obstructionist minority party the world
has ever seen, while their media preposterously salutes them as
champions of limited government, and demands so much “respect” for the
minority that they effectively run the Congress they couldn’t win at the
ballot box. We’ve been getting a preview of that
performance since 2014, and it’s been working, which is why so many
Republican voters are livid at the party Establishment.That’s where Donald Trump comes in.Lowry puts it well: “Progressives
have been perfectly willing to bless Obama’s post-constitutional
government.

Trump’s implicit promise is to respond in kind, and his
supporters think it’s about time.”They also think it’s about time for a
muscular assertion of American priorities on the world stage.

They’ve
been watching other nations ruthlessly pursue their agendas, while much
of the Western world is run by people who hate it, and think their own
countries need to suffer for a catalogue of past sins.

Some say it’s
time for global aggressors to see what it’s like when America plays by
the same rules they use.

At the very least, they want a quarterback who
plays for his own team.Personally, I want a leader who will
use Obama’s executive powers only to erase them, healing the
Constitution with the same instruments that were employed to wound it.

I want someone who can socially engineer the American populace until it
isn’t socially engineered any more.

Some say we get the government we
deserve, but for too long, our Ruling Class has abused its power to
create the electorate it wants.

It will not be easy to put things
right.

It might be impossible…

A little shred of possibility was
all our Founding Fathers needed to change the course of history, and we
are the heirs to their courage and vision.It’s not a bad start to terrorize the
Left with the possibility of a populist Republican president who
doesn’t give a damn what their media machine says.

The Western world
has a rich literary tradition of outlaws who restore justice.

The Left
is passionately in love with the idea of turning the decency and
restraint of their enemies against them, trapping them inside the house
of law while it burns down around them. That’s what Saul Alinsky’s infamous Rules for Radicals is
all about – probing aggressively for weaknesses in the established
order, and paralyzing its defenders with charges of hypocrisy.

As their
fear of Trump forces liberals to start talking about divided government
and limited executive power far ahead
of schedule, they find themselves on the wrong side of the Alinsky
formula for a change…

and that will create openings for sharp
conservatives to exploit in the 2016 races, all the way down the ballot.It’s a shame our political discourse has come to this, but Donald Trump is not the reason it
came to this.

Maybe the only way we can get Democrats on board with
demolishing the estate of unconstitutional power Obama leaves is to let
Trump turn it into a casino.

Fellow citizens, our mutual prosperity depends upon due process, freedom, free elections, free speech,integrity, legal protection of liberty, life, property and self-defense.Therefore we are only the leading Constitutional Independent Candidate for liberty, life, peace and prosperity.We are not funded by special warfare welfare interests with anti-American conflicts of interest.Thus we count on your self-interest and support now to win Independent Constitutional Representative Leadership for you and yours in 2016 and beyond:

BullionVaultPlease turn off TV brainwash, eschew social media espionage, yank cable umbilical cords.Give, get out and about to help US win freedom, peace, prosperity and American values.Thank you. Richard CharlesSilverSenator2016@gmail.comPO Box 1018Crystal BayNevada 89402-1018